this fire in my lungs (burns for the sky)
by tonberrys
Summary: Norbert(a) the dragon is smuggled from Hogwarts to Romania in the care of Charlie Weasley's friends. Norbert(a) POV. [Excerpt: The big hairy one wept like thunder and rain, opening my wooden crate for the third time since settling me in it as, and a drop of face-rain fell on my head with a pitter-patter sizzle, warm against my warmer scales.]


This one-shot was written for Round 4 (Pet Me) of the 2018 Quidditch League Fanfiction Competition, Season 6. I'm writing as a Chaser (3rd Position) for the Wimbourne Wasps.

Position Prompt: Write from a pet's perspective about an adventure.  
Optional Chaser Prompt #1: (restriction) no names  
Optional Chaser Prompt #2: (dialogue) "Who's a good boy/girl?"  
Optional Chaser Prompt #3: (action) running

Note: Although the dragon is recently hatched and referred to as a baby by Hagrid, I'm going with the "rapid growth, thus not actually as much of a wee baby as Hagrid views it" concept, despite proximity to hatching. Cue dramatic dragon POV and a sometimes inaccurate perspective of what is happening around it. Some of the structure and turns of phrase are a bit unconventional, but it's intended to reflect a more animalistic perspective. This is very different from other things I've written, so I hope the break from the norm is interesting!

Warning: Briefly graphic phrasing, but no actual living things are harmed (it's referring to the ~companion~ Hagrid gave Norbert in the books), so it's not an actual violence warning.

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 **this fire in my lungs (burns for the sky)**

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The big hairy one wept like thunder and rain, opening my wooden crate for the third time since settling me in it, and a drop of face-rain fell on my head with a pitter-patter sizzle, warm against my warmer scales. My wings ached to spread.

"Who's a good boy?" he boomed, a crackled choke as he buried my head in the fur of his face. I tried to nip at his arm, to return what I could tell was a squeeze of affection, but he dodged my effort with a heavy swoop. "Who's a brave little dragon? Yer mummy will miss yeh. The skies are wide, an' yeh'll love the fresh air... A new adventure awaits yeh, jus' don't-"

Pounding drew the attention of the big hairy one – my "mummy" – but not before he lowered the lid of the crate again, pressing upon me a dim isolation. No friend could be found in the thin streams of light, and smoke puffed from my nostrils with a certain restlessness. Already I was lonely, clicking my throat to be free, but I could tell he was drawn to the smaller creatures that had come to visit him.

Nestled in the corner of my crate was my gift-snack, staring back with beady eyes. My hairy mummy had placed it inside with me, "somethin' to keep yeh company." Snacks are great company. The smashed face and rounded ears were softened with thick brown fur, propped upright and unmoving with a lolling head. Unlike any other snack I had ever been given, when I snapped its neck with a gutteral clicking sound, only fluff lodged between my teeth. This snack was a terrible one, I decided then, shaking it in my mouth until fur like white clouds settled on the floor of my crate. My mummy's snacks were usually much better, small skittering things that squeaked, large flittering things that squawked, but this made no sound at all as I let the carcass fall amidst the fluff again.

With a sudden jolt, the crate was lifted. Instinctively, I tried to spread my spindly wings wide, shuffling against the wall of my crate with an urge to burst out, but my wings remained crumpled against my back. The night smelled like freedom, and echoing within my head were the chirps of prey, scurrying somewhere beyond my reach. The small ones jerked the crate around, rapid movements like running, though I knew inside of me that I could get there faster, even if I had never been beyond the walls of the hairy one's den.

My stubby horns knocked against the ceiling, and I could hear my hairy mummy's small ones knocking about outside in their clumsy run, clop-clopping up, up, upward as we drew closer to the sky. Several times, the crate stopped and started, jolted and jerked, but never once did my crate crash to the ground as it seemed it might. The night smelled further away, for some time, wrapped in stone as I was wrapped in wood. When the stars again flickered through the cracks of my crate, I could breathe in the sky once more.

Voices rose and mixed in the outside world, and I tried to turn around on top of my fluff, but there was little room to settle. No sooner had my head nestled atop my snack's soft, lumpish insides when again I was lifted – more smoothly, this time, and far higher until we were soaring through a coal-black sky. This is what I imagined it might feel like to spread out my wings, and I tried it again with just as little success, ramming instead against the wooden walls.

We flew and swayed, dove and rose, and as we moved further away, the smells outside changed. A brackish scent was filling my nostrils as I settled to chomp on the strange amber object my hairy mummy had left with my snack: clear to see through with some liquid inside, and it fit like a smooth stone between my jaws, small and thin and long. The liquid seared like glorious fire, but the amber container crushed between my teeth, spilling the remainder onto the fluff and through the cracks in the bottom of my crate.

The journey calmed, then, as even the creatures of the night slipped away, leaving no other sounds but the whirs of wind and my jovial flight companions. I had not seen wings on the hairy one or his small visitors, but maybe there were others who had them, just as I did.

Some time had passed before the brackish scent began to fade, and we landed this time for rats, which were dropped in through the top of my crate. One flyer peered inside, a broad one with midnight fur but no wings. When I snorted a greeting, his mouth spread wide in the way the hairy one's face so often did. I thought he was probably happy. I would be happy too, soaring among the twinkling lights above, and when I flapped my wings, they spilled out at the edges of the cracked crate.

"Soon, little one," he said, and then the crate darkened again, covered by its wooden lid.

The next time we stopped, I could smell something different, something different than I had ever smelled yet somehow intimately familiar.

I smelled something like me.

This time, the crate opened to one with fire in his hair and spots covering his face like a finely dotted rabbit. His mouth had stretched, too, split across in an upturned line. He looked like one of the small ones who came to visit me and my hairy mummy.

"A beauty," he said to the others, and as I lurched up to see the world around, the fiery one wrapped something around my head and my body which hugged me firmly, but not too tight.

My wings burst out, then, knocking the lid off from the crate. The fiery one shifted to the side, grasping a chain and holding his hands out with a gentle expression. His eyes were like the hairy one's, a different colour but just as reassuring. I stuck my head out to nip my greeting, but he carefully slipped under and over, taking my head gently in his hands to stroke the scales between the stubs of my horns, looking at the spines down my back and stretching out a wing to examine the tiny spike at the hinge of it.

"Fierce, too," he commented with a pat along my neck. "That's a long trip to be cooped up. Who's a good girl?"

His voice was less wet than my hairy mummy's, but I liked him. Again I lunged with furling nostrils, and this time he dodged backwards, holding his chain tighter still.

"I'm not sure she liked that," a thinner one said, more pale than the others. She was making a happy, huffing sound. "Or maybe he. It _is_ a bit hard to tell."

"We're bonding," said the fiery one, watching me brightly.

No one tried to press me back into the crate; no lid shut me in.

With a rapid beat, I rose above them, still wrapped in whatever the fire-haired one had slipped over me, but air and freedom alike rushed over me with an even warmer embrace, and I could see others like him running towards me. Further out, I could see what I had smelled immediately upon arriving: Others like _me_.

The chain tugged from below, and I could see a head of fire running towards my kind as his own kind crowded to a tiny stampede.

Lighting the sky with dragon fire, I flew above them, exhaling one adventure and rocketing towards another.


End file.
